Women vaccinated with the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are at higher risk of vaginal bleeding, according to a new study.
One or more doses of the messenger RNA shots increased the risk of the bleeding in women aged 12 to 74, Swedish researchers reported in the study, published on May 3 by the British Medical Journal.
Adjustments to the data resulted in the removal of some of the heightened risks, but even after adjustments, younger women were still more likely to experience bleeding after the first and third doses and older women were more likely to suffer from the issue after the first, second, and third doses.
A number of studies, primarily based on self-reporting of symptoms, have identified menstrual irregularities and bleeding as potential side effects of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. People have also filed reports to various reporting systems, such as the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, and Israeli officials found signs that Pfizer’s vaccine causes menstrual issues.
The Swedish researchers sought to examine the risks among the vaccinated by examining national data that covers every woman aged 12 to 74 in the country. After excluding women who had a history of certain conditions such as menstruation disorders and women living at special care facilities, the study population was 2.94 million. Cases were only included if they were diagnosed at a hospital or another health care facility.
Researchers plugged the data into a model that compared the person-time among the unvaccinated, including individuals who later received a vaccine, to the vaccinated. The top-level results were reported, as were numbers broken down by dose and age group, with the population divided into younger women (aged 12 to 49) and older women (50 to 74).
The study covered Dec. 27, 2020, to Feb. 28, 2022.
Increased Risks
Prior to adjustment, women of all ages in the population were found to be at higher risk of vaginal bleeding following vaccination. The younger women were also at a heightened risk of menstrual disturbance, defined as being diagnosed with “absent, scanty and rare menstruation” or “excessive, frequent and irregular menstruation.”
After adjusting for covariates such as marital status and days in the hospital, the risks were removed for some doses and diminished for others.
Adjustments almost entirely removed the menstrual disturbance risk, for example, though women were still found at increased risk within seven days of dose one. The risks of bleeding for the younger women were also reduced, though still present within seven days of doses one and three.
An increased risk of bleeding was still present for older women following the adjustments, with a hazard ratio of 1.28 within seven days of a third shot and 1.25 between eight and 90 days following a third dose.
Hazard ratios of one mean there’s no evidence of a negative effect or benefit, while ratios above one indicate an increased risk of an adverse effect. The adjusted results mean vaccinated older women were about 25 percent more likely to experience the bleeding after a third dose, and about 15 percent more likely after any dose.
The increased risk was seen with both Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccine, according to a stratified analysis of the data.
Pfizer and Moderna did not respond to requests for comment.
Conclusions
Dr. Rickard Ljung of the Swedish Medical Products Agency and his co-authors acknowledged the increased risks among the vaccinated but downplayed the findings.
“We observed weak and inconsistent associations between SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and healthcare contacts for postmenopausal bleeding, and even less consistent for menstrual disturbance, and premenstrual bleeding,” they wrote. SARS-CoV-2 is a name for the COVID-19 virus.
“Extensive adjustment for confounding attenuated most risk estimates. The patterns of association are not consistent with a causal effect. These findings do not provide any substantial support for a causal association between SARS-CoV-2 vaccination and healthcare contacts related to menstrual or bleeding disorders,” the researchers added.
Ljung told The Epoch Times in an email that the increased risk of vaginal bleeding within seven days was “most likely an already prevalent bleeding where the woman got vaccinated before appointment” with a health care professional.
Dr. Shelley Cole, an obstetrician-gynecologist in Texas, told The Epoch Times via email after reviewing the paper: “There was a 26% increase in menstrual disturbances in the 1-7 day timeframe. Yet, they cannot draw any conclusions about a causal relationship with the vaccine? Maybe they need to think just a little bit harder.”
Dr. Harvey Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, who was also not involved in the research, said that the study did not include enough events “to provide definitive conclusions about increased risks of menstrual disturbances or unexpected menstrual bleeding.”
“Too many variables were examined with respect to risks, in comparison to the limited amount of data. That having been said, the rates of bleeding events do not seem dramatically larger for vaccinated than for unvaccinated women,” Risch told The Epoch Times via email. “However, some caution in interpretation is warranted, because the degree to which menstrual disorders were detected by the medical care system in Sweden during this period is unclear, as the authors note.”
Limitations of the paper included its reliance on observational data. The research received funding from the Swedish government and researchers, including Ljung, reported conflicts of interest such as funding from Pfizer.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
